Viswanathan K's Thoughts

Scott Adams, the creator of Dilbert, wished that euthanasia were legal as his father suffered through his last days with no chance of getting better. But of course, euthanasia is illegal in most countries. (Many of the reasons why it’s illegal are perfectly valid: fear of misuse by relatives; a rash decision made by the patient when things look bleak and/or he is in agony that may well be short-lived and so on). Months after he had ranted and wished the worst sort of deaths for lawmakers who refused to allow even terminal patients to die easily, Adams came up with this idea of a doctor-assisted suicide machine that would combined a machine with a random number generator: “Let's say the random part of the device is attached by electronics to another part of the device that delivers a fatal dose of sedatives and poison to whoever is attached to it. You push the button and one of two things can randomly happen: o    Nothing o    Lethal drugs are released” ...

"Success is dangerous because often you don’t understand why you succeeded. You almost always know why you’ve failed" -          Marc Pincus, CEO of Zynga I liked the above quote the moment I read it. It took me a while, though, to realize that the statement reflects a philosophy as well. The same philosophy that it’s advocated in The Black Swan by Nicholas Nasim Taleb. If you haven’t read the book, let me state the philosophy. It states that in an environment that has tens (if not hundreds) of variables, it’s often difficult, if not impossible, to identify why exactly someone succeeded. Or failed. It could be just simple luck at times. At others, you pick Reason X for your success when in reality it was Reason Y! Like, most people in IT were lucky: we graduated at the right time (post liberalization and post all the communication investments done by the West in the dot com era). But many IT guys will delude themselves into believing that they...